The Pornographic and Erotic Imagination in the Twentieth Century West
The World of Sex (1940)
Henry Miller
Men's Adventure Magazines in Post-War America: The Rich Oberg Collection (2004)
Taschen
Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film (2005)
Jimmy McDonough
Miscellany of Sex (2007)
Francesca Twinn
Members Only: The Life and Times of Paul Raymond, Soho's Billionaire King of Burlesque (2010)
Paul Willetts
Henry Miller wrote the original draft of his
long essay The World of Sex in 1940 when he was about to turn 50, somewhat of a turning point for
any redblooded male, but the text was substantially revised for a
secondary publication in 1957 when he was nearing 70. This is a
relevant set of facts. This is not a male view of sex so much as that of
a highly sexualised male past his powers and frustrated at a world that
had always failed to accept him publicly for what he was. He
would not have been alone in that frustration - America 're-moralised'
itself in the wake of the Great Depression and the Second World War. The
1950s, even in California where he revised his text, was at the high point
of an age of sexual repression with few outlets for public discussion
of the themes that were close to Miller's heart.
This is why this text is confusing and is going to be of limited interest to all but specialists in cultural or literary studies. It is one third deep wisdom about the human condition (of which more in a moment), one third confused and confusing memoire that clearly has meaning to him but little to us and one third apocalyptic rant against American culture and its in-built propensity to violence. The rant is violent in its attack on violence. There are layers of meaning here that are quite Reichian (though Reich is never mentioned) but this component does not stand up to much intellectual scrutiny. Given that this essay was really for the few who already knew of Miller and his views (there is a touch of 'Apologia Pro Vita Sua' in all this), it nevertheless gives us an insight into the rage and frustration of a certain proportion of males under the grey moralism of American public culture of the day.
To his credit, and against the portentous style of the public intellectual of his day, whether liberal or Marxist, Miller does not say that all men should be as he is but only that society would be better if it allowed space for the free expression of his attitude to love and sex. O course, since then, our culture has given us more of that space (if not as much as we are often led to believe) and some of us do indeed think the world is, if not actually then potentially, a better place as a result. What is most interesting in this small book of 110 pages of script (actually more like 55 in any normal sized paperback) lies not in the ranting which is set firmly in its period (and which we won't even bother to analyse here) but in the first 30 pages where he describes a vision of love and sex which this author could identify with even if he could not identify with the man.
In a better time and place, these thirty pages, with a dash of thoughts from the end, would have been distilled into an opinion piece in a modern newspaper, the sort that Norman Mailer did so well, but the subject matter (and the liberal and determined use of street terms for private parts and acts) would not have been permitted it in his day. So he writes for close friends and posterity. We must read this as the latter today. As a result, the essay is self-indulgent. Yet it contains truths, albeit often expressed in that classically elliptical literary form that American essayists can prefer over simple clarity - as if being an intellectual demands that some things not be explained further even if it might be easy to do so. Miller has a vision of sex that might be called sacred-sexual today. He cannot divorce it from the emotion of love. He regards with contempt (as he notices women do) the tough guy obsessed with sexual performance and unable to make a commitment (though Miller is not talking about the commitment of traditional Judaeo-Christian morality).
Indeed, to be a man for Miller is not to bed women (as male culture crudely suggested within living memory) but to love women and seek out a communion with life. In this sense, there are very few real men in the world - a more startling proposition to the reader then than today when a real man would have been widely seen as an unemotional potential killing machine and home provider. This was, after all, only twelve years on from the Second World War. He is sharp on the effects of this on women ...
" The American ... oblivious of everything a woman has to offer except her body. He will treat an exceptional woman like a whore and fall madly in love with a nitwit ... What frightens the shit out of him is to give himself body and soul. The American woman, consequently, is frequently a love starved creature, clamouring for the moon. She will make a man work himself to the bone to satisfy her silly whims. Given free rein, she becomes truly insatiable."
Ouch! - does that not capture perfectly the Judaeo-Christian Anglo-Saxon culture of convention that has neither truly happy men or truly happy women in it? Or rather where some who are happy in such an environment have the help of an entire culture in bearing down on a partner, male or female, who is not. And that is the point. Some men and some women have been oppressed by their brothers and sisters. This is not a system that works exclusively for men against women or women against men but in favour of the conventional and timid against the creative and lively. It is not a gender war but a war between personality types: "For some sex leads to sainthood; for others it is the road to hell."
There is also a tantric quality to his thinking - not in that cod-'namaste' form so beloved of modern thirty-somethings in California and North London but in its true nature as an engagement with the left hand path of darkness, repulsion and the margins. He refers once to Buddhism but only to make the point that desire cannot be eradicated but must be used for self development (though he is not crystal clear on this or, indeed, most points). This aspect of self development is where I probably come closest to his views - not in the primacy of sex (although sexual, I see it as merely a facet of the diamond and not the diamond itself as does Miller himself) but in the value of sexuality as tool of personal development for oneself and one's partner or partners. I also share his view, partly Reichian we suspect, that the health of a culture and its propensity to violence and brutality does have some connection to the level at which persons with differing sexualities (including the wholly a-sexual) are allowed to be free in their expression without causing harm to others.
Miller goes into a somewhat fantastic riff on the new society that might emerge if this was recognised - this is his one lapse into daft 'public intellectualism'. His mix of noble savage meets new age is rather silly. There is some 'age of innocence' stuff that really does not stand up to scrutiny at all. He is a man of his time in believing in exceptional men and great religious leaders, a position scarcely tenable amongst most thinking people today. Yet his analysis of the culture of his day is not stupid. Although, in my view, the process of social improvement through sexual freedom may be possible, it is a long process involving the settling of more material concerns and a determined assault on authority. Resources are scarce. Authority bites back. The good society is a long way off yet. It cannot be hurried. Free spirits would do well to conserve their agenda, protect their freedoms, cut back the ambitions of any future Constantines and assist others in making society prosperous. But still, as Miller puts it, "If there is something wrong about our attitude to sex then there is something wrong with our attitude towards bread, towards money, towards work, towards play, towards everything."
His approach is not only avowedly 'spiritual' but seen in religious terms (I go with the former but not the latter). He sees women as persons in themselves rather than as objects for use. Indeed, the first thirty pages, though perhaps unsatisfactorily for many modern women, is a determined assault on the idea that men and women should treat each other clinically or as tools. Beneath his maleness and use of prostitutes and easy sex, a sex-positive feminist is working hard to get out. It is no accident that it is often women who prefer to read Miller (and Anais Nin) nowadays rather than men, who can get meatier fare elsewhere. But, at the end of the day, he is still caught between worlds with no public debate to help hone his thoughts. Even his five marriages testify to ambiguity (the last to a Japanese pop singer nearly fifty years his junior) - the jewel of high sexuality is still being set in the stone of convention. What Miller is really doing is trying to create space for 'his' world, as we all do. With some courage, given the period, he calls this world, the 'Land of Fuck'. The cognitive assault here is as sharp now as then but he is not talking about some cold-hearted permanent orgy amongst strangers - quite the opposite. He is struggling towards another vision where emotional engagement is not sanctified as eternal, caught in aspic, but is still recognised as 'true', naturally driven towards its physical expression.
Both parties in a relationship (although he does not state this directly, being a little egotistic as artists often are) should leave the process in better state than when they left it. The biological truth is probably that, for whatever neurochemical reason, Miller needs the process of 'fuck', actually the process of intimate confused engagement with another person, in order to be Henry Miller and that this process of discovery inevitably reaches a natural termination unless renewed positively through consent and understanding (perhaps the private dream of all such men). In a sense, not truly being a 'swinger' (where emotion is deliberately laid aside from sex) or a 'romantic' (where sex is something inconvenient and perhaps to be avoided as soiling a dream), Miller insists on merging the two - even with prostitutes. He may not love a hooker in quite the same way as a wife but he is determined that she be treated as a person and not an object - a lesson for the drafters of legislation.
Nor does he claim to understand sexuality. He is not interested in understanding it. He is interested in experiencing it. To him (indeed, I share this) it is a component of the 'life force', that which drives us to creativity and becoming. Life is not linear nor is it ordered. Sexual expression, by its very nature, represents the non-linear and disordered nature of being more than do most other expressions of that force. His vision is existentialist, there is no doubt about that. It is also a life of struggle freely chosen. He points out that there is disconnect between the person he is to those who know him and his writings and that this exists in their minds not his. His book reeks with frustration at not being understood. He is not the hypocrite. The 'others' are blind to his nature. He is not even a proselytiser for sex but for a freedom of which he would be a beneficiary. If we have to bring politics into this, he is an anarchist.
And what he says about 1940 and 1957 could equally apply to today - "Today we seem animated almost exclusively by fear. We fear even that which is good, that which is healthy, that which is joyous." Fear, he appears to suggest, can only be overcome by taking calculated risks or, in the words of others, 'just do it!' And do it with integrity - "If we live like weasels, we fuck like weasels; if we behave like monsters, we die like monsters. Now we eat, sleep, work, play - and even fuck - like automatons. It is the land of nod, with everyone spinning like tops." He adds: "If we were truly awake we would be stunned by the horror of everyday life. No one in his right senses could possibly do the crazy things which are now demanded of us every moment of the day. We are all victims, whether on top, at the bottom or in the middle. There is no escape, no immunity." Fair comment!
In fact, things are not that bad today or perhaps that was the case a decade ago and things may yet get that bad again as recession takes hold. A residual fear is still here yet the instincts of the population remain (just) to resist being treated as an object by authority. Sexual expression is still naive and perhaps not overly spiritual but great strides have been made in liberating the creative and the lively without oppressing those who prefer convention. How less resources and the fight-back of authority will affect this balance has yet to be seen, but we are reaching a point of critical mass, assisted by the internet, for libertarians. People who think like Miller are now easily available as bloggers and twitterers without any attempt at censorship. The rage is subsiding and resistance growing to an inherited culture of violence, especially state violence. Things could even get better. I am perhaps pessimistic on balance because of our nature as humanity but hope refuses to die.
This is why this text is confusing and is going to be of limited interest to all but specialists in cultural or literary studies. It is one third deep wisdom about the human condition (of which more in a moment), one third confused and confusing memoire that clearly has meaning to him but little to us and one third apocalyptic rant against American culture and its in-built propensity to violence. The rant is violent in its attack on violence. There are layers of meaning here that are quite Reichian (though Reich is never mentioned) but this component does not stand up to much intellectual scrutiny. Given that this essay was really for the few who already knew of Miller and his views (there is a touch of 'Apologia Pro Vita Sua' in all this), it nevertheless gives us an insight into the rage and frustration of a certain proportion of males under the grey moralism of American public culture of the day.
To his credit, and against the portentous style of the public intellectual of his day, whether liberal or Marxist, Miller does not say that all men should be as he is but only that society would be better if it allowed space for the free expression of his attitude to love and sex. O course, since then, our culture has given us more of that space (if not as much as we are often led to believe) and some of us do indeed think the world is, if not actually then potentially, a better place as a result. What is most interesting in this small book of 110 pages of script (actually more like 55 in any normal sized paperback) lies not in the ranting which is set firmly in its period (and which we won't even bother to analyse here) but in the first 30 pages where he describes a vision of love and sex which this author could identify with even if he could not identify with the man.
In a better time and place, these thirty pages, with a dash of thoughts from the end, would have been distilled into an opinion piece in a modern newspaper, the sort that Norman Mailer did so well, but the subject matter (and the liberal and determined use of street terms for private parts and acts) would not have been permitted it in his day. So he writes for close friends and posterity. We must read this as the latter today. As a result, the essay is self-indulgent. Yet it contains truths, albeit often expressed in that classically elliptical literary form that American essayists can prefer over simple clarity - as if being an intellectual demands that some things not be explained further even if it might be easy to do so. Miller has a vision of sex that might be called sacred-sexual today. He cannot divorce it from the emotion of love. He regards with contempt (as he notices women do) the tough guy obsessed with sexual performance and unable to make a commitment (though Miller is not talking about the commitment of traditional Judaeo-Christian morality).
Indeed, to be a man for Miller is not to bed women (as male culture crudely suggested within living memory) but to love women and seek out a communion with life. In this sense, there are very few real men in the world - a more startling proposition to the reader then than today when a real man would have been widely seen as an unemotional potential killing machine and home provider. This was, after all, only twelve years on from the Second World War. He is sharp on the effects of this on women ...
" The American ... oblivious of everything a woman has to offer except her body. He will treat an exceptional woman like a whore and fall madly in love with a nitwit ... What frightens the shit out of him is to give himself body and soul. The American woman, consequently, is frequently a love starved creature, clamouring for the moon. She will make a man work himself to the bone to satisfy her silly whims. Given free rein, she becomes truly insatiable."
Ouch! - does that not capture perfectly the Judaeo-Christian Anglo-Saxon culture of convention that has neither truly happy men or truly happy women in it? Or rather where some who are happy in such an environment have the help of an entire culture in bearing down on a partner, male or female, who is not. And that is the point. Some men and some women have been oppressed by their brothers and sisters. This is not a system that works exclusively for men against women or women against men but in favour of the conventional and timid against the creative and lively. It is not a gender war but a war between personality types: "For some sex leads to sainthood; for others it is the road to hell."
There is also a tantric quality to his thinking - not in that cod-'namaste' form so beloved of modern thirty-somethings in California and North London but in its true nature as an engagement with the left hand path of darkness, repulsion and the margins. He refers once to Buddhism but only to make the point that desire cannot be eradicated but must be used for self development (though he is not crystal clear on this or, indeed, most points). This aspect of self development is where I probably come closest to his views - not in the primacy of sex (although sexual, I see it as merely a facet of the diamond and not the diamond itself as does Miller himself) but in the value of sexuality as tool of personal development for oneself and one's partner or partners. I also share his view, partly Reichian we suspect, that the health of a culture and its propensity to violence and brutality does have some connection to the level at which persons with differing sexualities (including the wholly a-sexual) are allowed to be free in their expression without causing harm to others.
Miller goes into a somewhat fantastic riff on the new society that might emerge if this was recognised - this is his one lapse into daft 'public intellectualism'. His mix of noble savage meets new age is rather silly. There is some 'age of innocence' stuff that really does not stand up to scrutiny at all. He is a man of his time in believing in exceptional men and great religious leaders, a position scarcely tenable amongst most thinking people today. Yet his analysis of the culture of his day is not stupid. Although, in my view, the process of social improvement through sexual freedom may be possible, it is a long process involving the settling of more material concerns and a determined assault on authority. Resources are scarce. Authority bites back. The good society is a long way off yet. It cannot be hurried. Free spirits would do well to conserve their agenda, protect their freedoms, cut back the ambitions of any future Constantines and assist others in making society prosperous. But still, as Miller puts it, "If there is something wrong about our attitude to sex then there is something wrong with our attitude towards bread, towards money, towards work, towards play, towards everything."
His approach is not only avowedly 'spiritual' but seen in religious terms (I go with the former but not the latter). He sees women as persons in themselves rather than as objects for use. Indeed, the first thirty pages, though perhaps unsatisfactorily for many modern women, is a determined assault on the idea that men and women should treat each other clinically or as tools. Beneath his maleness and use of prostitutes and easy sex, a sex-positive feminist is working hard to get out. It is no accident that it is often women who prefer to read Miller (and Anais Nin) nowadays rather than men, who can get meatier fare elsewhere. But, at the end of the day, he is still caught between worlds with no public debate to help hone his thoughts. Even his five marriages testify to ambiguity (the last to a Japanese pop singer nearly fifty years his junior) - the jewel of high sexuality is still being set in the stone of convention. What Miller is really doing is trying to create space for 'his' world, as we all do. With some courage, given the period, he calls this world, the 'Land of Fuck'. The cognitive assault here is as sharp now as then but he is not talking about some cold-hearted permanent orgy amongst strangers - quite the opposite. He is struggling towards another vision where emotional engagement is not sanctified as eternal, caught in aspic, but is still recognised as 'true', naturally driven towards its physical expression.
Both parties in a relationship (although he does not state this directly, being a little egotistic as artists often are) should leave the process in better state than when they left it. The biological truth is probably that, for whatever neurochemical reason, Miller needs the process of 'fuck', actually the process of intimate confused engagement with another person, in order to be Henry Miller and that this process of discovery inevitably reaches a natural termination unless renewed positively through consent and understanding (perhaps the private dream of all such men). In a sense, not truly being a 'swinger' (where emotion is deliberately laid aside from sex) or a 'romantic' (where sex is something inconvenient and perhaps to be avoided as soiling a dream), Miller insists on merging the two - even with prostitutes. He may not love a hooker in quite the same way as a wife but he is determined that she be treated as a person and not an object - a lesson for the drafters of legislation.
Nor does he claim to understand sexuality. He is not interested in understanding it. He is interested in experiencing it. To him (indeed, I share this) it is a component of the 'life force', that which drives us to creativity and becoming. Life is not linear nor is it ordered. Sexual expression, by its very nature, represents the non-linear and disordered nature of being more than do most other expressions of that force. His vision is existentialist, there is no doubt about that. It is also a life of struggle freely chosen. He points out that there is disconnect between the person he is to those who know him and his writings and that this exists in their minds not his. His book reeks with frustration at not being understood. He is not the hypocrite. The 'others' are blind to his nature. He is not even a proselytiser for sex but for a freedom of which he would be a beneficiary. If we have to bring politics into this, he is an anarchist.
And what he says about 1940 and 1957 could equally apply to today - "Today we seem animated almost exclusively by fear. We fear even that which is good, that which is healthy, that which is joyous." Fear, he appears to suggest, can only be overcome by taking calculated risks or, in the words of others, 'just do it!' And do it with integrity - "If we live like weasels, we fuck like weasels; if we behave like monsters, we die like monsters. Now we eat, sleep, work, play - and even fuck - like automatons. It is the land of nod, with everyone spinning like tops." He adds: "If we were truly awake we would be stunned by the horror of everyday life. No one in his right senses could possibly do the crazy things which are now demanded of us every moment of the day. We are all victims, whether on top, at the bottom or in the middle. There is no escape, no immunity." Fair comment!
In fact, things are not that bad today or perhaps that was the case a decade ago and things may yet get that bad again as recession takes hold. A residual fear is still here yet the instincts of the population remain (just) to resist being treated as an object by authority. Sexual expression is still naive and perhaps not overly spiritual but great strides have been made in liberating the creative and the lively without oppressing those who prefer convention. How less resources and the fight-back of authority will affect this balance has yet to be seen, but we are reaching a point of critical mass, assisted by the internet, for libertarians. People who think like Miller are now easily available as bloggers and twitterers without any attempt at censorship. The rage is subsiding and resistance growing to an inherited culture of violence, especially state violence. Things could even get better. I am perhaps pessimistic on balance because of our nature as humanity but hope refuses to die.
As to Taschen on men's adventure magazines from that same era, well, what can one say! This is a typical
Taschen collection of the culturally marginal. Men's Adventure
Magazines is a book of covers from the Rich Oberg Collection. These
magazines were an American publishing phenomenon that lasted from the
interwar period through to their eventual demise in the late 1960s. The
startling but often very repetitive art work provides some interesting
source material for twentieth century cultural history. But here
is a question that arises from the book - what happens in a free market
society when unsatisfied psychological needs demand fulfilment within a
very conventional culture? One answer is that entrepreneurs create
fantasies that can be both acceptable to the buyer (who wants the
thrill) and to society (which needs reassurance that the thrill will not
prove destructive). These magazines tell us a great deal about what
many working class American males felt they could be seen to want
amongst their peers - and what was not acceptable.
The artwork is one thing but the short but excellent guideline articles by the Editors provide the meat of the book. We are not dealing with some eternal essence of man fascinated by tales of bondage and rape, submission to exotic females and that hoary (excuse the pun) old classic, the madonna-harlot division of all womankind. Something very specific in time and place is going as an unstable industrialised society faced depression and war and sought to find a way to keep the popular imagination fixed on ideals that would keep that society. Cohesion was far more important than resolving personal inner conflicts. The covers cannot be described easily, they have to be experienced. The rather dark vision of the male mind that they offer can be profitably reviewed alongside Gillian Freeman's book on underground sexual literature at the tail end of the period (the 1960s) which we reviewed earlier [ https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/1357533749858980599/2881903139460812753 ]. Some of the comments on the aggression in that literature apply to this review - and vice versa. We are talking about minds wired in a certain way.
What was going on here? Why did these magazines appear at this time and in this way? Apart, that is, from the fact that a free market society created new opportunities for swift-on-the-feet entrepreneurs with cheap resourcing of text and of image and efficient distribution systems. The economics of these particular pulps are easy to understand but the question nags whether the need they met was 'normal' or merely normal for a very disturbed culture in transition to the world we know now. There are three critical events in the story of the American working male as a sexual being at this time - the Catholic-led reaction to free imaginative expression as depression bit deep into the economy, the actual experience of war, and the effect, as the cause of the demise of the magazines, of the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
The first event transformed any expression of sexuality into a threat to be managed - the result was a toxic amalgam of suspicion and sadism as a substitute for openness. The Catholic Church, and that sort of 'expert' in psychology who has caused so much damage to so many people, conspired to, in a phrase, damn fantasy to hell. It is hard to believe that a culture of comic book fantasy that is now global through films and television was regarded as a primary threat to moral order, especially to children. The imagination of tens of thousands of teenagers and young males was treated as a problem rather than as a creative opportunity. A world of peasant priests and repressed intellectuals tried to keep the passions of the people bound within norms of their partial making - a vile crime was done to culture and imagination and is still being done today by similar theocracies of the mind. Many men were not merely constrained in their sexual imagination, so that 'normal' thoughts became abnormal, wicked, even evil, but were unable to negotiate with women as sexual beings directly. Gender relations became strained through conventions that were ultimately dictated, in an apparently secular society, by faith-based groups and moralists, of which the Catholic hierarchy and the psychological community were merely a part. The failed drive against alcohol and the successful drives against drugs and gambling represented a disturbed streak in American life that extended, as 'American values', across the world - romantic love, Ayn Rand self-discipline, rugged individualism, competition ...
The second event, following the misery for the American working class of the seemingly never-ending economic depression, was war - in some ways, a blessed relief to many young males. Not just one great and noble war occasioned by Pearl Harbour but a succession of wars that culminated in the debacle in Vietnam. Comradeship, purpose, fear as a profound experience - for a few, this was the high point of their existence. But now, working men were constrained from talking about their actual experience of war in both its sexual and violent aspects when they came home. You did not bring home the 'truth' of quick refugee sex or of officially sanctioned whore-houses or your bonded mates brains being blown out over your own face or the experience of killing a kid no older than yourself. The homestead was to be protected from the reality of injun-killing. Death was supposed to be a ritual with a meaning - the meaninglessnes of combat was not for wives and children. And so protection from reality became protection from the truth. This logically came to mean the construction of noble lies - noble lies became the necessary lingua franca of politics and of commerce. The right to lie in order to protect or sell is sacrosanct in our culture.
A conventional society, protective of its lies and its values, forced many men, not only fighters but those trapped into early marriage and working on the shop floor, into an internal world of desperate rage and inner violence. Did this translate into actual secret violence against women and the abuse of sex workers? Undoubtedly. Yet this was not going to be about sex but impotence. The covers in this book tell the story with depressing regularity of form and function. For something like thirty years, entrepreneurs, limited on one side by strange norms of decency that still haunt America today (the fear of the nipple alongside the love of blood and sado-masochistic submission) and on the other by the market censorship of the military bases, created the fantasies that served this sad component of a sick society. What made America was treated like the manufacture of sausages - you did not want to see how it was done lest you cease enjoying the meal.
The covers showed what these often very brave and frightened men feared in symbolic form - constant animal attacks, evil overseas enemies, savage tribespeople, castrating strong women - and what they wanted in their hearts - to kill and survive in direct bloody combat, often with beautiful whore-women fighting alongside them against unimaginable evils (whether Nazi or Red merely depended on the year). The texts were filled with sexual anxiety, especially of what their 'pure' women back home might be getting up to and how deviants in society conducted themselves (prostitutes, satanists, college kids) - with an element of envy no doubt. The sexuality was always one of struggle - the men are more often victims than victors, expressing their hormone-drenched manhood in saving sexually potent women from sadists, whose sadism, of course, is observed in loving detail. These magazines sold and in their hundreds of thousands so they do have a meaning and it cries out at you - these men wanted sexual liberation as heroes with women alongside who understood them.
What killed these magazines off was the arrival of a sexuality of a different sort. Paradoxically, the culture was gentler but, in taking off the edge of fear, perhaps even less respectful of women. The culture of Penthouse and Playboy treated women like objects of desire but the action man aspect was no longer necessary. The ending of the draft, growing middle class doubts about the virtues of war and the more overt forms of imperialism, and the slide into the economic gloom of the 1970s bifurcated the market into college-educated and the rest. The loss of mass military markets and the opportunity to see more flesh and read more openly about sexuality (albeit from a rather limited perspective) pulled the volume business out from under a phenomenon that depended on mass repression and rage in about equal proportions. Hustler added the crude element to bridge the gap - famously in its vicious meat-grinder cover. This was the third set of events - the assertion of liberal freedom in court cases in the UK and US that allowed a new breed of entrepreneurs to open an already socially liberal door in London and then displace the older breed of pulps with better photography and material. The book makes clear that, through Penthouse (now very tame), the British introduced their alien liberalism - a hall mark of the core English character - around 1970. The competitive pressure helped drive the pulps out.
The last thirty years might be termed an era in which we have seen a steady, slow calming of the Western male psyche. Faith-based repression and the experience of war has diminished except in traditional communities or the lumpen parts of the working class on which the State has relied to kill and to die for it. Women fought back in the wake of the seventies sexual revolution - often bitterly. They too have calmed as a credit fuelled consumer culture enabled women to express themselves independently. The phenomenon of 'sex-positive feminism' has eliminated the madonna-whore stereotype quite effectively in the last half century. In most of the West, certainly in its prosperous areas, this shared calming of gender conflict (albeit that this has now been rekindled by bitter activists playing power games), free of the pressures of religion and war, has resulted in a wry understanding, far from perfect, that seemed. until recently, to improve with each passing year. But has it and will it continue to do so? Is the 'normal' man basically a sex-crazed thug as these pulps and many feminists of the 1970s might imply? The last two cycles (the 1930s and 1970s) both started in eras of economic disruption and we are in the midst of another.
The first cycle damaged the sexual balance in favour of an unnatural and essential formalisation of roles leaving behind the wreckage of enraged men and frustrated women. The struggle for resources in this era (the Church cannot take the blame for all that happened) resulted in a conventionalisation of domestic life for the sake of a fixed vision of society in many places. This happened in Nazi Germany, in Soviet Russia, in increasingly imperial America (albeit with more chance of a strike out for freedom by a determined individual) - less so in the UK. The second cycle created its own sense of disorder for working class lives but the essential demand for freedom was too strong, creating profound pain between generations. This second thirty year cycle has seen economic and social-sexual freedom move so fast so that the world we see today would be unrecognisable to the Second World War soldier. We saw a global porn industry accessible to anyone, a celebrity culture epitomised art the time by Paris Hilton, an egalitarian legal structure for men and women, an aversion to conscripted war (despite the recent dabblings of the liberal internationalists) and the widespread commercialisation of sexuality as a marketing tool for goods and services.
What will the next thirty year cycle bring? These pulp covers, other books such as Freeman's and the growing body of evidence that suggests that the brain is malleable to an amazing degree suggest that how we are in our relations to the other sex is always a fine calibration between our limbic reality and the demands made by social, political and economic forces beyond our control. Faced with disorder, authorities seek to constrain sexual modes by force of habit. But it is hard to see how, even with the probable increase in wars and insurgencies and radical claims from faith-based and new ideological groups, we can go back easily to the industrialised society's conventionalisation of sexual relations - the social conditions and lack of access to free information are not there. States and societies can no longer control minds in quite the way they could in the West - and less so in the emerging world. The internet ensures that the management of complexity is now at a premium rather than the futile attempt to simplify human complexity to some simple ideological set of propositions. There are no longer 'norms'. Essentialism is absurd because it just does not work.
But we should never underestimate the pressure on freedom from those attempting to create order out of the growing chaos of recession, possibly depression, in the next cycle. There are already strange sexual puritanisms, associated with traditionalism, emerging in the public discourse of rising new powers like China, Indi and Indonesia. Faith-based groups may have failed to capture the global agenda in the Bush era and have withdrawn from the heart of power but their agenda has partly been lodged in the minds of sections of the elite in a spurious link between freedom and disorder. The abortion rights issue (which is actually not necessarily connected to the sexual freedom agenda) in the US has also showed us that women are the force in democratic politics, not men. In wars, men still largely do the dying and women the organising of the 'heimat'.
Illiberal groups, often claiming to be progressive, continue to attempt to manage sexual politics from behind closed doors, with their own brands of spurious research, to try to bring the extreme liberalism of recent years to heel. And, of course, God knows what service in Iraq and Afghanistan did to tens of thousands of young men now moving into early middle age. This book is recommended as raw material - women will find it downright disturbing or laughably absurd. But they should not believe that these pulps represent what men are - any more than the slutty Cosmo Girl launched in 2003 represented what young teenage women were - but only what some men were obliged to become by the convention, repression and manipulation of their 'betters'. Resistance to this sort of thing is never futile, it is continual and necessary - and is always a joint project for both men and women.
The artwork is one thing but the short but excellent guideline articles by the Editors provide the meat of the book. We are not dealing with some eternal essence of man fascinated by tales of bondage and rape, submission to exotic females and that hoary (excuse the pun) old classic, the madonna-harlot division of all womankind. Something very specific in time and place is going as an unstable industrialised society faced depression and war and sought to find a way to keep the popular imagination fixed on ideals that would keep that society. Cohesion was far more important than resolving personal inner conflicts. The covers cannot be described easily, they have to be experienced. The rather dark vision of the male mind that they offer can be profitably reviewed alongside Gillian Freeman's book on underground sexual literature at the tail end of the period (the 1960s) which we reviewed earlier [ https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/1357533749858980599/2881903139460812753 ]. Some of the comments on the aggression in that literature apply to this review - and vice versa. We are talking about minds wired in a certain way.
What was going on here? Why did these magazines appear at this time and in this way? Apart, that is, from the fact that a free market society created new opportunities for swift-on-the-feet entrepreneurs with cheap resourcing of text and of image and efficient distribution systems. The economics of these particular pulps are easy to understand but the question nags whether the need they met was 'normal' or merely normal for a very disturbed culture in transition to the world we know now. There are three critical events in the story of the American working male as a sexual being at this time - the Catholic-led reaction to free imaginative expression as depression bit deep into the economy, the actual experience of war, and the effect, as the cause of the demise of the magazines, of the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
The first event transformed any expression of sexuality into a threat to be managed - the result was a toxic amalgam of suspicion and sadism as a substitute for openness. The Catholic Church, and that sort of 'expert' in psychology who has caused so much damage to so many people, conspired to, in a phrase, damn fantasy to hell. It is hard to believe that a culture of comic book fantasy that is now global through films and television was regarded as a primary threat to moral order, especially to children. The imagination of tens of thousands of teenagers and young males was treated as a problem rather than as a creative opportunity. A world of peasant priests and repressed intellectuals tried to keep the passions of the people bound within norms of their partial making - a vile crime was done to culture and imagination and is still being done today by similar theocracies of the mind. Many men were not merely constrained in their sexual imagination, so that 'normal' thoughts became abnormal, wicked, even evil, but were unable to negotiate with women as sexual beings directly. Gender relations became strained through conventions that were ultimately dictated, in an apparently secular society, by faith-based groups and moralists, of which the Catholic hierarchy and the psychological community were merely a part. The failed drive against alcohol and the successful drives against drugs and gambling represented a disturbed streak in American life that extended, as 'American values', across the world - romantic love, Ayn Rand self-discipline, rugged individualism, competition ...
The second event, following the misery for the American working class of the seemingly never-ending economic depression, was war - in some ways, a blessed relief to many young males. Not just one great and noble war occasioned by Pearl Harbour but a succession of wars that culminated in the debacle in Vietnam. Comradeship, purpose, fear as a profound experience - for a few, this was the high point of their existence. But now, working men were constrained from talking about their actual experience of war in both its sexual and violent aspects when they came home. You did not bring home the 'truth' of quick refugee sex or of officially sanctioned whore-houses or your bonded mates brains being blown out over your own face or the experience of killing a kid no older than yourself. The homestead was to be protected from the reality of injun-killing. Death was supposed to be a ritual with a meaning - the meaninglessnes of combat was not for wives and children. And so protection from reality became protection from the truth. This logically came to mean the construction of noble lies - noble lies became the necessary lingua franca of politics and of commerce. The right to lie in order to protect or sell is sacrosanct in our culture.
A conventional society, protective of its lies and its values, forced many men, not only fighters but those trapped into early marriage and working on the shop floor, into an internal world of desperate rage and inner violence. Did this translate into actual secret violence against women and the abuse of sex workers? Undoubtedly. Yet this was not going to be about sex but impotence. The covers in this book tell the story with depressing regularity of form and function. For something like thirty years, entrepreneurs, limited on one side by strange norms of decency that still haunt America today (the fear of the nipple alongside the love of blood and sado-masochistic submission) and on the other by the market censorship of the military bases, created the fantasies that served this sad component of a sick society. What made America was treated like the manufacture of sausages - you did not want to see how it was done lest you cease enjoying the meal.
The covers showed what these often very brave and frightened men feared in symbolic form - constant animal attacks, evil overseas enemies, savage tribespeople, castrating strong women - and what they wanted in their hearts - to kill and survive in direct bloody combat, often with beautiful whore-women fighting alongside them against unimaginable evils (whether Nazi or Red merely depended on the year). The texts were filled with sexual anxiety, especially of what their 'pure' women back home might be getting up to and how deviants in society conducted themselves (prostitutes, satanists, college kids) - with an element of envy no doubt. The sexuality was always one of struggle - the men are more often victims than victors, expressing their hormone-drenched manhood in saving sexually potent women from sadists, whose sadism, of course, is observed in loving detail. These magazines sold and in their hundreds of thousands so they do have a meaning and it cries out at you - these men wanted sexual liberation as heroes with women alongside who understood them.
What killed these magazines off was the arrival of a sexuality of a different sort. Paradoxically, the culture was gentler but, in taking off the edge of fear, perhaps even less respectful of women. The culture of Penthouse and Playboy treated women like objects of desire but the action man aspect was no longer necessary. The ending of the draft, growing middle class doubts about the virtues of war and the more overt forms of imperialism, and the slide into the economic gloom of the 1970s bifurcated the market into college-educated and the rest. The loss of mass military markets and the opportunity to see more flesh and read more openly about sexuality (albeit from a rather limited perspective) pulled the volume business out from under a phenomenon that depended on mass repression and rage in about equal proportions. Hustler added the crude element to bridge the gap - famously in its vicious meat-grinder cover. This was the third set of events - the assertion of liberal freedom in court cases in the UK and US that allowed a new breed of entrepreneurs to open an already socially liberal door in London and then displace the older breed of pulps with better photography and material. The book makes clear that, through Penthouse (now very tame), the British introduced their alien liberalism - a hall mark of the core English character - around 1970. The competitive pressure helped drive the pulps out.
The last thirty years might be termed an era in which we have seen a steady, slow calming of the Western male psyche. Faith-based repression and the experience of war has diminished except in traditional communities or the lumpen parts of the working class on which the State has relied to kill and to die for it. Women fought back in the wake of the seventies sexual revolution - often bitterly. They too have calmed as a credit fuelled consumer culture enabled women to express themselves independently. The phenomenon of 'sex-positive feminism' has eliminated the madonna-whore stereotype quite effectively in the last half century. In most of the West, certainly in its prosperous areas, this shared calming of gender conflict (albeit that this has now been rekindled by bitter activists playing power games), free of the pressures of religion and war, has resulted in a wry understanding, far from perfect, that seemed. until recently, to improve with each passing year. But has it and will it continue to do so? Is the 'normal' man basically a sex-crazed thug as these pulps and many feminists of the 1970s might imply? The last two cycles (the 1930s and 1970s) both started in eras of economic disruption and we are in the midst of another.
The first cycle damaged the sexual balance in favour of an unnatural and essential formalisation of roles leaving behind the wreckage of enraged men and frustrated women. The struggle for resources in this era (the Church cannot take the blame for all that happened) resulted in a conventionalisation of domestic life for the sake of a fixed vision of society in many places. This happened in Nazi Germany, in Soviet Russia, in increasingly imperial America (albeit with more chance of a strike out for freedom by a determined individual) - less so in the UK. The second cycle created its own sense of disorder for working class lives but the essential demand for freedom was too strong, creating profound pain between generations. This second thirty year cycle has seen economic and social-sexual freedom move so fast so that the world we see today would be unrecognisable to the Second World War soldier. We saw a global porn industry accessible to anyone, a celebrity culture epitomised art the time by Paris Hilton, an egalitarian legal structure for men and women, an aversion to conscripted war (despite the recent dabblings of the liberal internationalists) and the widespread commercialisation of sexuality as a marketing tool for goods and services.
What will the next thirty year cycle bring? These pulp covers, other books such as Freeman's and the growing body of evidence that suggests that the brain is malleable to an amazing degree suggest that how we are in our relations to the other sex is always a fine calibration between our limbic reality and the demands made by social, political and economic forces beyond our control. Faced with disorder, authorities seek to constrain sexual modes by force of habit. But it is hard to see how, even with the probable increase in wars and insurgencies and radical claims from faith-based and new ideological groups, we can go back easily to the industrialised society's conventionalisation of sexual relations - the social conditions and lack of access to free information are not there. States and societies can no longer control minds in quite the way they could in the West - and less so in the emerging world. The internet ensures that the management of complexity is now at a premium rather than the futile attempt to simplify human complexity to some simple ideological set of propositions. There are no longer 'norms'. Essentialism is absurd because it just does not work.
But we should never underestimate the pressure on freedom from those attempting to create order out of the growing chaos of recession, possibly depression, in the next cycle. There are already strange sexual puritanisms, associated with traditionalism, emerging in the public discourse of rising new powers like China, Indi and Indonesia. Faith-based groups may have failed to capture the global agenda in the Bush era and have withdrawn from the heart of power but their agenda has partly been lodged in the minds of sections of the elite in a spurious link between freedom and disorder. The abortion rights issue (which is actually not necessarily connected to the sexual freedom agenda) in the US has also showed us that women are the force in democratic politics, not men. In wars, men still largely do the dying and women the organising of the 'heimat'.
Illiberal groups, often claiming to be progressive, continue to attempt to manage sexual politics from behind closed doors, with their own brands of spurious research, to try to bring the extreme liberalism of recent years to heel. And, of course, God knows what service in Iraq and Afghanistan did to tens of thousands of young men now moving into early middle age. This book is recommended as raw material - women will find it downright disturbing or laughably absurd. But they should not believe that these pulps represent what men are - any more than the slutty Cosmo Girl launched in 2003 represented what young teenage women were - but only what some men were obliged to become by the convention, repression and manipulation of their 'betters'. Resistance to this sort of thing is never futile, it is continual and necessary - and is always a joint project for both men and women.
Big Bosoms and Square Jaws should be unedifying. After all it is the biography of a cult pornographer written by a gonzo journalist. In
fact, it is highly educational on three different grounds. The man is
interesting. The era is interesting (as far as popular culture and
sexuality is concerned). And the insights it gives into the lives of
women on the margins of Hollywood at the tail end of its Golden Age are
interesting. The man first. Russ Meyer was a soldier before he
was anything else - McDonough makes the point more than once and it
deserves the repetition. He learnt his trade with the 166th Signals and
had a 'good war'. His skills and connections brought him into industrial
films and permitted him his half-hobby of glamour photography. When the
latter started to pay it was but a small step to taking his film
experience and entering the sexploitation market with 'nudie cuties',
making use of the pool of burlesque and sex industry workers that had
emerged in California on the fringes of the movie industry.
The culture in which this took place needs to be understood. We have said much of what need to be said in the review above of Henry Miller's World of Sex (in which he writes as a pre-war generation libertine surveying with dismay the aggression and cultural conservatism of post-war America) and of Taschen's edition of men's adventure magazine covers from the same period. The point bears repeating that a generation of young men, often raised in straitened circumstances during the Depression, went to war, experienced fear, adrenaline and sex in close proximity for the first time and then had to return to a conservative settler culture dominated by female values as if nothing had happened. Far from patriarchal, the culture was matriarchal - it is the world of the West after Gary Cooper's High Noon experience. Male violence and sexuality had a tendency to be pushed underground and then merge in a form of bonding through misogyny that Meyer's films represented and exploited.
We will get on to the role that Russ Meyer's films were to play in the liberation of parts of America from that closed culture but it was not a liberation that was understood or intended by Meyer (he attributed the revolution with some justification to Hugh Hefner's 'Playboy' which offered a softer, more 'romantic' view of women as distant beauties) or by his audiences who largely wanted relief from domestic pressures without questioning the American dream or Christian values.Many commentators have noted that Meyer's characters are often powerful castrating women with signature large breasts (the sexual meaning of breast size and how it shifts from large to 'pert' over the generations is one of the great mysteries of th euniverse). McDonough notes how Meyer, filled with adrenaline as if film-making was combat, acted like the worst sort of bully in order to get his films done and dusted within budget and on time. But was this misogyny or simply the same creative obsession of many men with a 'project'? Other evidence suggests that he was pandering to a misogynistic response to a matriarchal culture (set within a wider patriarchal economic system) rather than that he was misogynistic himself ...
There is certainly a misogyny in these films but not quite in a simplistic way. Much can be made of the monster of a mother behind Meyer and of Meyer's decline in powers being linked not just to his Alzheimer's but to her death. This is certainly one for 'Psycho-Style' analysis perhaps, but he would not have been able to make these films if he did not have hundreds of thousands of paying customers, largely married males or males still stuck at home under the thumbs of mothers but bonding in all-male work-places or living from forces reunion to forces reunion, who identified with this imagery - much as their mothers and wives identified with the romantic story-lines of films starring Cary Grant or Audrey Hepburn.
This brings us on to the second theme of the book which in itself makes it well worth reading - the transition in American popular culture from repressed conservatism to 'anything goes' (in parts). Although there were mainstream movies (neutered from portraying sexual themes by the Hays Code) and there was hard core stag material in the 1930s and 1940s which were clearly exploitative in the very worst sense, there was little or nothing inbetween to look at as the soldiers returned from war. Early material (which brought Meyer into the business) was little more than showing nudity, with a Carry On implication of naughtiness, some ersatz anthropological interest or a fake moral condemnation inserted, certainly with no sight or sign of pubic hair, let alone genitals.
Meyer used his experience and his pool of girls, whom he seems to have treated with sexual respect without use of the 'casting couch' that was still a factor in mainstream Hollywood (at least until very late in his career), to shift from these fake anthropological films to 'nudie cuties' with some limited story line and thence to the 'classic' sexploitation movies like Faster Pussycat Kill Kill! - all turbocharged female aggression designed to excite males who wanted to recognise both the wimp in themselves and to fantasise about the real men they would be if only they got the chance. Meyer played this to the hilt but he treated rather deep psychological matters with broad humour (again, much like the Carry On franchise), no holds barred on suggestion, cartoonish violence and fast cutting - it was catharsis on film. Meyer was eventually invited to the collapsing Fox Studios because his formula was working but, with the usual lack of intelligence of corporate man, he was brought in at the end of a cycle and not at the beginning of one.
The culture in which this took place needs to be understood. We have said much of what need to be said in the review above of Henry Miller's World of Sex (in which he writes as a pre-war generation libertine surveying with dismay the aggression and cultural conservatism of post-war America) and of Taschen's edition of men's adventure magazine covers from the same period. The point bears repeating that a generation of young men, often raised in straitened circumstances during the Depression, went to war, experienced fear, adrenaline and sex in close proximity for the first time and then had to return to a conservative settler culture dominated by female values as if nothing had happened. Far from patriarchal, the culture was matriarchal - it is the world of the West after Gary Cooper's High Noon experience. Male violence and sexuality had a tendency to be pushed underground and then merge in a form of bonding through misogyny that Meyer's films represented and exploited.
We will get on to the role that Russ Meyer's films were to play in the liberation of parts of America from that closed culture but it was not a liberation that was understood or intended by Meyer (he attributed the revolution with some justification to Hugh Hefner's 'Playboy' which offered a softer, more 'romantic' view of women as distant beauties) or by his audiences who largely wanted relief from domestic pressures without questioning the American dream or Christian values.Many commentators have noted that Meyer's characters are often powerful castrating women with signature large breasts (the sexual meaning of breast size and how it shifts from large to 'pert' over the generations is one of the great mysteries of th euniverse). McDonough notes how Meyer, filled with adrenaline as if film-making was combat, acted like the worst sort of bully in order to get his films done and dusted within budget and on time. But was this misogyny or simply the same creative obsession of many men with a 'project'? Other evidence suggests that he was pandering to a misogynistic response to a matriarchal culture (set within a wider patriarchal economic system) rather than that he was misogynistic himself ...
There is certainly a misogyny in these films but not quite in a simplistic way. Much can be made of the monster of a mother behind Meyer and of Meyer's decline in powers being linked not just to his Alzheimer's but to her death. This is certainly one for 'Psycho-Style' analysis perhaps, but he would not have been able to make these films if he did not have hundreds of thousands of paying customers, largely married males or males still stuck at home under the thumbs of mothers but bonding in all-male work-places or living from forces reunion to forces reunion, who identified with this imagery - much as their mothers and wives identified with the romantic story-lines of films starring Cary Grant or Audrey Hepburn.
This brings us on to the second theme of the book which in itself makes it well worth reading - the transition in American popular culture from repressed conservatism to 'anything goes' (in parts). Although there were mainstream movies (neutered from portraying sexual themes by the Hays Code) and there was hard core stag material in the 1930s and 1940s which were clearly exploitative in the very worst sense, there was little or nothing inbetween to look at as the soldiers returned from war. Early material (which brought Meyer into the business) was little more than showing nudity, with a Carry On implication of naughtiness, some ersatz anthropological interest or a fake moral condemnation inserted, certainly with no sight or sign of pubic hair, let alone genitals.
Meyer used his experience and his pool of girls, whom he seems to have treated with sexual respect without use of the 'casting couch' that was still a factor in mainstream Hollywood (at least until very late in his career), to shift from these fake anthropological films to 'nudie cuties' with some limited story line and thence to the 'classic' sexploitation movies like Faster Pussycat Kill Kill! - all turbocharged female aggression designed to excite males who wanted to recognise both the wimp in themselves and to fantasise about the real men they would be if only they got the chance. Meyer played this to the hilt but he treated rather deep psychological matters with broad humour (again, much like the Carry On franchise), no holds barred on suggestion, cartoonish violence and fast cutting - it was catharsis on film. Meyer was eventually invited to the collapsing Fox Studios because his formula was working but, with the usual lack of intelligence of corporate man, he was brought in at the end of a cycle and not at the beginning of one.
The 1960s had brought new libertarian thinking on
sexuality. Although Beyond the Valley of the Dolls might be
regarded as a bridge between eras, Meyer's vision was no longer going to
be as meaningful in the 1970s. It became a pastiche of itself. Incidentally, Supervixens is creative enough that it will probably be one of
those few films that you will leave not entirely believing that it had
actually happened and it is worth seeing for that experience alone.
Apart from his influence on later generations of art film directors such as Waters and Tarantino (from a stylistic point of view), Meyer can lay claim to two longer term 'effects' on American culture.The first is that the women he created had an unintended and paradoxical role to play in first gay and then sex-positive female iconography. What started out as a castration and domination fantasy for post-war traumatised and confused males was to transmute itself into the imagery of strong glamorous women who could defend themselves and kick red-neck ass. The crass Lady Gaga video (based on Faster Pussycat Kill Kill!) is merely the fag end of this cultural revolution, its degradation into the mass commercialisation of style over substance. More positively, Meyer's imagery (alongside the existence of such luminaries as the ever-smiling Bettie Page) played its role in turning burlesque from an economic refuge for abused women on the lam, into an art form by women for women, an ironic sex-positive statement where women choose to become erotic fantasies for themselves and other women rather than for men. Men are now increasingly more likely to be found being fleeced (at least in the big cities) by corporate lap-dancers and strippers with full human resources departments behind them.
The second is that Meyer, alongside the really hard core print pornographers like Larry Flynt, was instrumental in fighting First Amendment cases that opened the door for mainstream Hollywood to move into sex and violence on its own accord in the 1970s and enabled the hard core industry to push Meyer's style of cartoon sex and violence into the history books. The revolution in cultural acceptance of extreme violence and the slightly slower path to extreme sexual portrayal began under conditions of recession and technological innovation (largely the need for Hollywood to deal head-on with family-friendly competition from TV in the 1970s). The determined litigiousness of Meyer and his ilk, as usual demonstrating the truth that big business likes small business to create or defend new markets at its own expense before moving in on the territory itself, removed a layer of caution - legal costs are a major deterrent when you have stockholders to answer to and big business can be defined by its own cowardice. Perhaps the current recession and innovation in the internet will see similar changes in current troubled 'old' media like print media.
This was a worldwide phenomenon. Hammer Horror films, as an independent, began to crumble under recessionary pressures as mainstream pictures proved capable of being more visceral or psychological than their romantic Gothic approach (helped along no doubt by late Hitchcock). The Carry On franchise followed the same trajectory as the Russ Meyer films - a slow death as broad defusive humour was no longer required if sex could be portrayed full-on and, well, as sexual. The period before the 1970s in both the US and UK had relegated sex to the art movie house while mass sexual culture thrived on the titter (UK) and on the crude belly laugh (US). What the market really wanted was the thrill of gore and, eventually, penetration. Meyer did not do penetration or hard core and only late came to the portrayal of non-straight sex. His sex was highly energetic but definitely vanilla. Meyer's eventual decline is charted in this book in almost cruel detail, partly explained by McDonough's reliance on personal testimony from those who worked with Meyer. The affairs of his estate were messy on his death and his last years were confused with many different opinions on how this senile old man was being cared for. Since everyone had an opinion and McDonough clearly has his own concerns, the last chapter or so turns into an unedifying 'he said, she said'.
Nevertheless, despite his own occasional moments of adrenaline-fuelled linguistic excess (this is not a book to lend to Grandmamma), McDonough writes with verve and can tell an anecdote as if you were there yourself. There are times when any red-blooded male, despite himself, is going to belly laugh at some of the japes and jollities of Mr. Meyer and his crew of filmic bandits. But Meyer was a complex man - nice is not a word you would use about him. On set, he was a bully with a degree of cruel manipulation that shows either a strategy drawn out of the theories of Stanislavski or, more likely, an inner rage than came out when he was 'in combat'. McDonough makes the point more than once that film-making for Meyer was like his experience in the 166th Signals - deadly serious, live-or-die and that total loyalty was required from all those around him Given all this, what is fascinating is the strange love and loyalty given to him by his starlets - and even those women with whom he had temptestuous relationships seem to have given as good as they got in the long run. Being married to Meyer or in a relationship sounds like the worst nightmare of any modern feminist but until his latter days when his standards clearly slipped, he seems to have behaved personally well to his starlets and they seem generally to have cared for him.
It is hard to know what is going on here, especially as the treatment of women may go on the charge sheet of anyone determined to condemn him as MCP - the excuse 'that was then, this is now' always only goes so far. McDonough tends to lay out the facts and avoid theorising on 'gender relations' but there are enough facts to hazard a theory. Meyer seems to have been increasingly dysfunctional in actual relationships as time went on. Much of this can be put down to the relationship with that same, subsequently insane, mother, straight out of late Hitchcock, who helped inspire the castrating female fantasy that reached its apogee in Tura Satana's performance in 'Pussycat'. But even here, there is a progression in his life from a 'normal' marriage that did not work, through a 'business' marriage that foundered on his sexual artistic ambitions and risk-taking and onward through ever further deterioration to the extremely dysfunctional and on occasions violent (not by him) relationship with his last lover. In other words, there is no necessary link between his personal treatment of women close to him and his alleged misogyny except that he becomes more dysfunctional as his powers wane - a psychologist might speculate that creative frustration leads to a practised misogyny because he can't get rid of his frustrations on screen but that would be highly speculative.
The starlets are a separate case again - some clearly nyphomaniac, some abused in the past, some not-so-bright but some also very together women with a practical approach to business and full control of their bodies. The women are as various as might be expected in any community with the only common denominator being that they tended to come from the 'softer' ends of the sex industry - modelling, burlesque, small roles on the fringes of Hollywood. They were certainly not linked to the 'hard' prostitution and stag film side of it. They were, by standards, mostly 'good bad girls' of a sort and one starlet had her mother accompany her to the shoot much to the irritation of Mr. Meyer. The impression given is that Meyer really was primarily interested in their roles as filmic or photo fodder (there are some excellent photographs giving a flavour of the changing image of the women over the decades). They may have been abused in the past (and there are one or two nightmare tales in the book) but, given no social services to pick them up in the cruel world of American capitalism, the 'soft' sex industry was actually giving them a livelihood without any necessity for more abuse than they might get today working for some oppressive human resources-led capitalist retail operation. Meyer was offering them decent if not over-generous pay and a role as well as, except on set, basically respectful treatment by the American standards of the time.
Meyer's 'decent' enemies come out no better than he. His 'golden age' was well before the rise of feminism. No doubt he would have felt the ire of feminists if his films had not slipped under the radar screen during their high point of influence and only returned to notice during the post-feminist sex-positive era. McDonough spends a little time on one Charles Keating who seemed to have made it his life's mission to crush pornography under his heel in Ohio. Meyer was one of his prime targets. Interestingly, it was Keating who was central to the Savings & Loan scandal and the book has disturbing stories of implied sexual harassment that make Meyer look like a model employer. One of the problems that the sexual moralists have in America is that, no matter how sleazy the sex industry gets, lacking a consensus on socialist solutions to exploitation, there are enough moral monsters on their own side to ensure that sex industry figures can still look, relatively, like saints.
So, this book is recommended as an entertaining read which is well written by someone with the ability to make us feel as if we know the subject and that we can make our own judgements as to whether we would want to know or do business with him. But it is equally recommended as a source of important data on the transition of American culture from a rural and small town conservatism to an urban-based libertarianism, a process that is still under way. It also raises interesting questions about morality under capitalism - though this is my interest not McDonough's. Meyer's films were an entrepreneurial response to a need in the market that the system could not satisfy. They almost certainly did no harm (though his last efforts are nastier, they are not much nastier than what was coming out of the recession-hit mainstream or what was going on in the drug-fuelled post-Vietnam street). They may (arguably) have done some good in allowing steam to be let off periodically by all those involved.
At the end of the day, the immorality probably lies mostly in the initial creation of the rage implicit in those market needs which comes from the tension that had emerged between male aspirations and female expectations under conditions of first poverty, then war and then conformity. The Hollywood romance had given 'nice' people the illusion that all was well in a way that was little different from the state-controlled media of the rival communist world. Meanwhile, insecurity and abuse on the margins of society (much like child abuse in the Catholic Church) were not merely ignored as unmentionable but misfits with a different sexual nature or who had been abused or whose families had broken up were excluded, forced to sublimate their feelings (as soldiers were not permitted to speak of their wartime experience or, indeed, Holocaust survivors of their losses) went mad (like Meyer's sister, the tragic Lucinda) or, if they were a bit feisty, made their way to a big city or Hollywood and took what jobs they could.
The sex industry, soft and hard, may, in some cases, be the exploitative draw for sex traffickers but it may also - under free market conditions - be the means by which men and women can find their own economic freedom and social position and, ultimately, as in Meyer's films, contribute to culture. One of Meyer's starlets picked herself up and later became a small town teacher - in an instructive tale of the destructive affects of stigma, she feared her children knowing their mother's past when the biography was raised only to find that her kids had found the prints of the movie and wondered why she had not mentioned it. They seem to have been untraumatised and relaxed. The common denominator in Meyer's circle is that these were people from a marginalised society, often very disturbed but equally as likely to be as tough as nuts, and that they cohered as a community of sorts no different from the village of Ambridge. Meyer had his stock of actors and actresses and some of them he would use over and over again - until they upset him, of course. His weird attitude to loyalty is a constant theme in the book but we have all met strange neurotics like that in business so it should not alarm us unduly.
Indeed, many of Meyer's flaws are reproducible amongst all mildly sociopathic small businessmen in small towns across the 'free world'. He was, in fact, a typical anti-communist entrepreneur who just happened to have an obsession with large breasts and turned it to his economic advantage. Many other men have turned other less startling obsessions into businesses that made them wealthy. His little world was simultaneously abusive, quasi-feudal, a creative endeavour and a refuge for the marginalised i.e. the world of American capitalism writ small. Until 'moralists' understand that it is not enough to condemn the output of the sex industry but must be prepared to engage in some form of 'socialism' (government or community engagement) to deal with abuse and bullying at source before they can claim to have an opinion on these burgeoning industries, they are moral hypocrites.
Even then, the demand for sexual imagery, adapted to the psychology of the time, for women as much as men, and for sexual services is going to be a 'given' for a long time to come in society. It is perhaps time to treat the industries themselves with as much regulatory attention as one might employ to protect the workers of Walmart (de minimis) and remove the air of stigma around sexual services so that at least the workers would get the full value of their labour, know that what they did was a matter of free economic choice in a culture that accepted them as persons in their own right and be able to use these jobs as way stations from the margins to the sort of family life or personal fulfilment that is their due.
Apart from his influence on later generations of art film directors such as Waters and Tarantino (from a stylistic point of view), Meyer can lay claim to two longer term 'effects' on American culture.The first is that the women he created had an unintended and paradoxical role to play in first gay and then sex-positive female iconography. What started out as a castration and domination fantasy for post-war traumatised and confused males was to transmute itself into the imagery of strong glamorous women who could defend themselves and kick red-neck ass. The crass Lady Gaga video (based on Faster Pussycat Kill Kill!) is merely the fag end of this cultural revolution, its degradation into the mass commercialisation of style over substance. More positively, Meyer's imagery (alongside the existence of such luminaries as the ever-smiling Bettie Page) played its role in turning burlesque from an economic refuge for abused women on the lam, into an art form by women for women, an ironic sex-positive statement where women choose to become erotic fantasies for themselves and other women rather than for men. Men are now increasingly more likely to be found being fleeced (at least in the big cities) by corporate lap-dancers and strippers with full human resources departments behind them.
The second is that Meyer, alongside the really hard core print pornographers like Larry Flynt, was instrumental in fighting First Amendment cases that opened the door for mainstream Hollywood to move into sex and violence on its own accord in the 1970s and enabled the hard core industry to push Meyer's style of cartoon sex and violence into the history books. The revolution in cultural acceptance of extreme violence and the slightly slower path to extreme sexual portrayal began under conditions of recession and technological innovation (largely the need for Hollywood to deal head-on with family-friendly competition from TV in the 1970s). The determined litigiousness of Meyer and his ilk, as usual demonstrating the truth that big business likes small business to create or defend new markets at its own expense before moving in on the territory itself, removed a layer of caution - legal costs are a major deterrent when you have stockholders to answer to and big business can be defined by its own cowardice. Perhaps the current recession and innovation in the internet will see similar changes in current troubled 'old' media like print media.
This was a worldwide phenomenon. Hammer Horror films, as an independent, began to crumble under recessionary pressures as mainstream pictures proved capable of being more visceral or psychological than their romantic Gothic approach (helped along no doubt by late Hitchcock). The Carry On franchise followed the same trajectory as the Russ Meyer films - a slow death as broad defusive humour was no longer required if sex could be portrayed full-on and, well, as sexual. The period before the 1970s in both the US and UK had relegated sex to the art movie house while mass sexual culture thrived on the titter (UK) and on the crude belly laugh (US). What the market really wanted was the thrill of gore and, eventually, penetration. Meyer did not do penetration or hard core and only late came to the portrayal of non-straight sex. His sex was highly energetic but definitely vanilla. Meyer's eventual decline is charted in this book in almost cruel detail, partly explained by McDonough's reliance on personal testimony from those who worked with Meyer. The affairs of his estate were messy on his death and his last years were confused with many different opinions on how this senile old man was being cared for. Since everyone had an opinion and McDonough clearly has his own concerns, the last chapter or so turns into an unedifying 'he said, she said'.
Nevertheless, despite his own occasional moments of adrenaline-fuelled linguistic excess (this is not a book to lend to Grandmamma), McDonough writes with verve and can tell an anecdote as if you were there yourself. There are times when any red-blooded male, despite himself, is going to belly laugh at some of the japes and jollities of Mr. Meyer and his crew of filmic bandits. But Meyer was a complex man - nice is not a word you would use about him. On set, he was a bully with a degree of cruel manipulation that shows either a strategy drawn out of the theories of Stanislavski or, more likely, an inner rage than came out when he was 'in combat'. McDonough makes the point more than once that film-making for Meyer was like his experience in the 166th Signals - deadly serious, live-or-die and that total loyalty was required from all those around him Given all this, what is fascinating is the strange love and loyalty given to him by his starlets - and even those women with whom he had temptestuous relationships seem to have given as good as they got in the long run. Being married to Meyer or in a relationship sounds like the worst nightmare of any modern feminist but until his latter days when his standards clearly slipped, he seems to have behaved personally well to his starlets and they seem generally to have cared for him.
It is hard to know what is going on here, especially as the treatment of women may go on the charge sheet of anyone determined to condemn him as MCP - the excuse 'that was then, this is now' always only goes so far. McDonough tends to lay out the facts and avoid theorising on 'gender relations' but there are enough facts to hazard a theory. Meyer seems to have been increasingly dysfunctional in actual relationships as time went on. Much of this can be put down to the relationship with that same, subsequently insane, mother, straight out of late Hitchcock, who helped inspire the castrating female fantasy that reached its apogee in Tura Satana's performance in 'Pussycat'. But even here, there is a progression in his life from a 'normal' marriage that did not work, through a 'business' marriage that foundered on his sexual artistic ambitions and risk-taking and onward through ever further deterioration to the extremely dysfunctional and on occasions violent (not by him) relationship with his last lover. In other words, there is no necessary link between his personal treatment of women close to him and his alleged misogyny except that he becomes more dysfunctional as his powers wane - a psychologist might speculate that creative frustration leads to a practised misogyny because he can't get rid of his frustrations on screen but that would be highly speculative.
The starlets are a separate case again - some clearly nyphomaniac, some abused in the past, some not-so-bright but some also very together women with a practical approach to business and full control of their bodies. The women are as various as might be expected in any community with the only common denominator being that they tended to come from the 'softer' ends of the sex industry - modelling, burlesque, small roles on the fringes of Hollywood. They were certainly not linked to the 'hard' prostitution and stag film side of it. They were, by standards, mostly 'good bad girls' of a sort and one starlet had her mother accompany her to the shoot much to the irritation of Mr. Meyer. The impression given is that Meyer really was primarily interested in their roles as filmic or photo fodder (there are some excellent photographs giving a flavour of the changing image of the women over the decades). They may have been abused in the past (and there are one or two nightmare tales in the book) but, given no social services to pick them up in the cruel world of American capitalism, the 'soft' sex industry was actually giving them a livelihood without any necessity for more abuse than they might get today working for some oppressive human resources-led capitalist retail operation. Meyer was offering them decent if not over-generous pay and a role as well as, except on set, basically respectful treatment by the American standards of the time.
Meyer's 'decent' enemies come out no better than he. His 'golden age' was well before the rise of feminism. No doubt he would have felt the ire of feminists if his films had not slipped under the radar screen during their high point of influence and only returned to notice during the post-feminist sex-positive era. McDonough spends a little time on one Charles Keating who seemed to have made it his life's mission to crush pornography under his heel in Ohio. Meyer was one of his prime targets. Interestingly, it was Keating who was central to the Savings & Loan scandal and the book has disturbing stories of implied sexual harassment that make Meyer look like a model employer. One of the problems that the sexual moralists have in America is that, no matter how sleazy the sex industry gets, lacking a consensus on socialist solutions to exploitation, there are enough moral monsters on their own side to ensure that sex industry figures can still look, relatively, like saints.
So, this book is recommended as an entertaining read which is well written by someone with the ability to make us feel as if we know the subject and that we can make our own judgements as to whether we would want to know or do business with him. But it is equally recommended as a source of important data on the transition of American culture from a rural and small town conservatism to an urban-based libertarianism, a process that is still under way. It also raises interesting questions about morality under capitalism - though this is my interest not McDonough's. Meyer's films were an entrepreneurial response to a need in the market that the system could not satisfy. They almost certainly did no harm (though his last efforts are nastier, they are not much nastier than what was coming out of the recession-hit mainstream or what was going on in the drug-fuelled post-Vietnam street). They may (arguably) have done some good in allowing steam to be let off periodically by all those involved.
At the end of the day, the immorality probably lies mostly in the initial creation of the rage implicit in those market needs which comes from the tension that had emerged between male aspirations and female expectations under conditions of first poverty, then war and then conformity. The Hollywood romance had given 'nice' people the illusion that all was well in a way that was little different from the state-controlled media of the rival communist world. Meanwhile, insecurity and abuse on the margins of society (much like child abuse in the Catholic Church) were not merely ignored as unmentionable but misfits with a different sexual nature or who had been abused or whose families had broken up were excluded, forced to sublimate their feelings (as soldiers were not permitted to speak of their wartime experience or, indeed, Holocaust survivors of their losses) went mad (like Meyer's sister, the tragic Lucinda) or, if they were a bit feisty, made their way to a big city or Hollywood and took what jobs they could.
The sex industry, soft and hard, may, in some cases, be the exploitative draw for sex traffickers but it may also - under free market conditions - be the means by which men and women can find their own economic freedom and social position and, ultimately, as in Meyer's films, contribute to culture. One of Meyer's starlets picked herself up and later became a small town teacher - in an instructive tale of the destructive affects of stigma, she feared her children knowing their mother's past when the biography was raised only to find that her kids had found the prints of the movie and wondered why she had not mentioned it. They seem to have been untraumatised and relaxed. The common denominator in Meyer's circle is that these were people from a marginalised society, often very disturbed but equally as likely to be as tough as nuts, and that they cohered as a community of sorts no different from the village of Ambridge. Meyer had his stock of actors and actresses and some of them he would use over and over again - until they upset him, of course. His weird attitude to loyalty is a constant theme in the book but we have all met strange neurotics like that in business so it should not alarm us unduly.
Indeed, many of Meyer's flaws are reproducible amongst all mildly sociopathic small businessmen in small towns across the 'free world'. He was, in fact, a typical anti-communist entrepreneur who just happened to have an obsession with large breasts and turned it to his economic advantage. Many other men have turned other less startling obsessions into businesses that made them wealthy. His little world was simultaneously abusive, quasi-feudal, a creative endeavour and a refuge for the marginalised i.e. the world of American capitalism writ small. Until 'moralists' understand that it is not enough to condemn the output of the sex industry but must be prepared to engage in some form of 'socialism' (government or community engagement) to deal with abuse and bullying at source before they can claim to have an opinion on these burgeoning industries, they are moral hypocrites.
Even then, the demand for sexual imagery, adapted to the psychology of the time, for women as much as men, and for sexual services is going to be a 'given' for a long time to come in society. It is perhaps time to treat the industries themselves with as much regulatory attention as one might employ to protect the workers of Walmart (de minimis) and remove the air of stigma around sexual services so that at least the workers would get the full value of their labour, know that what they did was a matter of free economic choice in a culture that accepted them as persons in their own right and be able to use these jobs as way stations from the margins to the sort of family life or personal fulfilment that is their due.
The Miscellany of Sex
is an occasionally amusing but sometimes unreliable bit of
entertainment that is an edge too strong for the family toilet but
passes a few hours in the boudoir.
Members Only is a well written
biography of a limited man but a fascinating subject - Paul Raymond and
the creation of the British adult entertainment sector between the
repressed 1950s and the libertarian 1980s. (First a disclaimer. I knew Paul Willetts and
I liked him. He is a natural gentleman but this has not influenced my review). The book is not
really about sex so much as it is about business and society.
Considering Willetts comes from a literary background, he has made a
very good fist of telling the story of a late twentieth century
entrepreneur whose lack of self awareness and drive for wealth made him
simultaneously a sincere Roman Catholic and the founder of an adult
entertainment empire, albeit one that was merely the cash flow means to
the end of becoming a property magnate.
In this respect, the book should be sitting on the business and cultural studies as well as biography shelves. Raymond enjoyed the sensual life of a louche playboy until age and the death of his daughter from a drugs overdose plunged him into reclusive misery but his motive was never sensual pleasure. He put in long hours to build real wealth - not wealth as high-minded people would understand it, solid manufacturing say, but wealth as the free market would understand it, cash in bank and freeholds. By the time of his death he was a billionaire. But there are not a few billionaires in the world today. Many of them are as dull as dish water just as, all things considered, was Mr. Raymond. So why invest time and (for the publisher) money in a biography that is clearly not an official account nor a vanity product? The answer lies in his milieu. Willetts, whose prose style is crystal clear and easy to read without being at all over-simplified, knows Soho intimately even if he does not know the sex industry well. He is well aware of the depth of social change that took place between the time Raymond was little more than a spiv and his death as lord of all he surveyed.
Willetts is not imaginative in one respect. He cannot get out of his educated class in his attitude to sexuality. He still persists in seeing the adult entertainment industry through somewhat prissy eyes on occasion - with the odd crack at 'sleaze' like a latterday tabloid moralist. He perhaps does not quite get capitalism or the possibility that Raymond was providing opportunities that did not exist for men and women who wanted them so that he was (admittedly unintendedly) a force for good. Capitalism is about meeting desires. Two sets of desires, male lust and female independence, came together in the flow of businesses that Raymond built up and then ruthlessly jettisoned when they had served his purpose - nudie revues and stripping, night clubs, nude theatre, pornographic films and porn magazines that moved from coy airbrushing to no holds-barred 'readers' wives' columns and pictures over thirty years.
There are some excellent pictures in the book, although the coyness of author and publisher fails to show us the later material from Club International, Escort and Razzle. The fear of sexuality that lurks in the English middle class, especially when it is selling its wares on the basis of sexual interest, is, frankly, comical but that is the culture we have been granted and so we must, regrettably, live within it. Raymond fought off moralists like Longford and Whitehouse (much as Russ Meyer was doing in the US, as we have already reviewed), out-manouevred (often in a very gutsy way) corrupt coppers, politicians and very vague laws and treated feminists with perhaps the disdain they deserved. On the other hand, he was in it for the money and was as exploitative as any other capitalist might be (though clearly a better employer on the evidence than most in his industry and many outside it). There is certainly no evidence that properly run capitalist adult entertainment is or was more exploitative than the average business operation under capitalism in the last century. Certainly Raymond's was less exploitative than the smaller-scale quasi-criminal underworld sex industry.
To be fair to him, he started as a hoofer of sorts in the last days of a degenerate music hall and seems to have retained his respect for the little man on the way up. Similarly, he seems to have been respectful of the women who worked for him. There is little evidence of the casting couch - on the contrary, the girlfriends seemed to be having a crack at him to get a part. The first set of desires that made this man wealthy were simply sexual pleasures - taken at a distance - not bonking but just the pleasure a man gets from observing naked women. It is just a fact. Feminists might witter on about 'objectification' but this is absurd ideological theory. The point is simple - in the objective conditions of the time there are women who freely choose and perhaps enjoy presenting themselves to the male gaze. By what right does any churchman or matriarch or Frankfurt School ideologue tell two willing parties to the exchange that they are doing wrong? Anyone who knows women knows that women like to be observed. The Revue Bar represented merely a matter of degree in turning a profit out of the arbitrage between watching and being watched.
Unless you have some standard that relies on God or natural law (which is hard to hold in a post-existentialist world), then the ideology dictating laws against free choice looks oppressive - indeed, downright 'liberal fascist' in that Swedish or American middle class progressive way. The point is that sex is about free exchange and, until feminists sort out the bigger problem of the working of the free market for both men and women (since the desire to observe and to preen will always be with us), what Raymond offered was, for many women, liberation from families and small communities. These women wanted, more than anything, to live in London, earn their own way in life, to have 'fun' and cash, not to be trapped into a provincial marriage or a dull office or retail job. Their primary asset was their beauty - much as a footballer's primary asset is his strength and skill. Only a prissy grammar school girl, resentful of 'looks', would want to deny them their short place in the sun.
All that Raymond did was to bring these two sets of desire together to the great benefit economically of himself, to the lesser and sometimes questionable but generally sound benefit of the girls and to the emotional (though not financial) benefit of the men. In short, distaste for what he was doing is merely aesthetic or neurotic. Raymond's aesthetics were certainly grim (Willetts account of his taste in furnishings would have many a fashionista reaching for their bren gun) but poor taste is not, despite the influence of Oscar Wilde, a capital crime. He was also at the heart of a number of other minor cultural revolutions - he played a role in the cultural liberation of the homosexual community and, perhaps, wider acceptance of transvestism, he played an ambiguous role in preserving Soho from the sort of large-scale brutalist development of the 1970s, he helped open up the theatre to free bodily expression and he was in at the start of the stand-up comedy phenomenon that is now mainstream.
Compare the situation of the provincial but not very educated young beauty, the gay or the transgender person, the centre of London, the English theatre and alternative comedy in the 1960s (pace Peter Cook) with the situation thirty years later and, in each, Raymond played his philistine and unwitting but positive role. This is why the book is almost required reading for anyone interested in how England became the free-wheeling sexual culture that it was until the current conservative miserabilist reaction - albeit a half-baked one where observation is preferred to participation, where the gaze is preferred to the act. It is all about the market, stupid. It was a market, in his case, built out of the spivvery of a disrupted post-war London. The establishment could never forgive him for presenting disruptive normal desires to them, pointing out that their restraint was, well, not really necessary and then winning acceptance for things and ideas that ruined their cosy bourgeois idyll.
Yes, Willetts occasionally struggles with a man whose private life descends by the 1970s into something only comparable with soap operas like 'Dallas' and 'Dynasty'. Gaps have to be filled with anecdote yet he has done a spectacular job in terms of research and interviews so that we get one of the best pictures I have ever seen of ordinary people in an extraordinary situation. If these people had not been satellites around a remarkable business genius, they would be just another of England's council estate familes ... and such people rarely get a biography. This book is highly recommended. The problem is just that Raymond (rather than his times) does struggle to be interesting in himself. I hope his publishers now commission Willetts to look at a similar type of figure but one with more, shall we say, oomph to him as a personality. But Willetts makes up for all this by telling a clear story of a place (Soho), its characters and its development. If you love London, you will love this book.
In this respect, the book should be sitting on the business and cultural studies as well as biography shelves. Raymond enjoyed the sensual life of a louche playboy until age and the death of his daughter from a drugs overdose plunged him into reclusive misery but his motive was never sensual pleasure. He put in long hours to build real wealth - not wealth as high-minded people would understand it, solid manufacturing say, but wealth as the free market would understand it, cash in bank and freeholds. By the time of his death he was a billionaire. But there are not a few billionaires in the world today. Many of them are as dull as dish water just as, all things considered, was Mr. Raymond. So why invest time and (for the publisher) money in a biography that is clearly not an official account nor a vanity product? The answer lies in his milieu. Willetts, whose prose style is crystal clear and easy to read without being at all over-simplified, knows Soho intimately even if he does not know the sex industry well. He is well aware of the depth of social change that took place between the time Raymond was little more than a spiv and his death as lord of all he surveyed.
Willetts is not imaginative in one respect. He cannot get out of his educated class in his attitude to sexuality. He still persists in seeing the adult entertainment industry through somewhat prissy eyes on occasion - with the odd crack at 'sleaze' like a latterday tabloid moralist. He perhaps does not quite get capitalism or the possibility that Raymond was providing opportunities that did not exist for men and women who wanted them so that he was (admittedly unintendedly) a force for good. Capitalism is about meeting desires. Two sets of desires, male lust and female independence, came together in the flow of businesses that Raymond built up and then ruthlessly jettisoned when they had served his purpose - nudie revues and stripping, night clubs, nude theatre, pornographic films and porn magazines that moved from coy airbrushing to no holds-barred 'readers' wives' columns and pictures over thirty years.
There are some excellent pictures in the book, although the coyness of author and publisher fails to show us the later material from Club International, Escort and Razzle. The fear of sexuality that lurks in the English middle class, especially when it is selling its wares on the basis of sexual interest, is, frankly, comical but that is the culture we have been granted and so we must, regrettably, live within it. Raymond fought off moralists like Longford and Whitehouse (much as Russ Meyer was doing in the US, as we have already reviewed), out-manouevred (often in a very gutsy way) corrupt coppers, politicians and very vague laws and treated feminists with perhaps the disdain they deserved. On the other hand, he was in it for the money and was as exploitative as any other capitalist might be (though clearly a better employer on the evidence than most in his industry and many outside it). There is certainly no evidence that properly run capitalist adult entertainment is or was more exploitative than the average business operation under capitalism in the last century. Certainly Raymond's was less exploitative than the smaller-scale quasi-criminal underworld sex industry.
To be fair to him, he started as a hoofer of sorts in the last days of a degenerate music hall and seems to have retained his respect for the little man on the way up. Similarly, he seems to have been respectful of the women who worked for him. There is little evidence of the casting couch - on the contrary, the girlfriends seemed to be having a crack at him to get a part. The first set of desires that made this man wealthy were simply sexual pleasures - taken at a distance - not bonking but just the pleasure a man gets from observing naked women. It is just a fact. Feminists might witter on about 'objectification' but this is absurd ideological theory. The point is simple - in the objective conditions of the time there are women who freely choose and perhaps enjoy presenting themselves to the male gaze. By what right does any churchman or matriarch or Frankfurt School ideologue tell two willing parties to the exchange that they are doing wrong? Anyone who knows women knows that women like to be observed. The Revue Bar represented merely a matter of degree in turning a profit out of the arbitrage between watching and being watched.
Unless you have some standard that relies on God or natural law (which is hard to hold in a post-existentialist world), then the ideology dictating laws against free choice looks oppressive - indeed, downright 'liberal fascist' in that Swedish or American middle class progressive way. The point is that sex is about free exchange and, until feminists sort out the bigger problem of the working of the free market for both men and women (since the desire to observe and to preen will always be with us), what Raymond offered was, for many women, liberation from families and small communities. These women wanted, more than anything, to live in London, earn their own way in life, to have 'fun' and cash, not to be trapped into a provincial marriage or a dull office or retail job. Their primary asset was their beauty - much as a footballer's primary asset is his strength and skill. Only a prissy grammar school girl, resentful of 'looks', would want to deny them their short place in the sun.
All that Raymond did was to bring these two sets of desire together to the great benefit economically of himself, to the lesser and sometimes questionable but generally sound benefit of the girls and to the emotional (though not financial) benefit of the men. In short, distaste for what he was doing is merely aesthetic or neurotic. Raymond's aesthetics were certainly grim (Willetts account of his taste in furnishings would have many a fashionista reaching for their bren gun) but poor taste is not, despite the influence of Oscar Wilde, a capital crime. He was also at the heart of a number of other minor cultural revolutions - he played a role in the cultural liberation of the homosexual community and, perhaps, wider acceptance of transvestism, he played an ambiguous role in preserving Soho from the sort of large-scale brutalist development of the 1970s, he helped open up the theatre to free bodily expression and he was in at the start of the stand-up comedy phenomenon that is now mainstream.
Compare the situation of the provincial but not very educated young beauty, the gay or the transgender person, the centre of London, the English theatre and alternative comedy in the 1960s (pace Peter Cook) with the situation thirty years later and, in each, Raymond played his philistine and unwitting but positive role. This is why the book is almost required reading for anyone interested in how England became the free-wheeling sexual culture that it was until the current conservative miserabilist reaction - albeit a half-baked one where observation is preferred to participation, where the gaze is preferred to the act. It is all about the market, stupid. It was a market, in his case, built out of the spivvery of a disrupted post-war London. The establishment could never forgive him for presenting disruptive normal desires to them, pointing out that their restraint was, well, not really necessary and then winning acceptance for things and ideas that ruined their cosy bourgeois idyll.
Yes, Willetts occasionally struggles with a man whose private life descends by the 1970s into something only comparable with soap operas like 'Dallas' and 'Dynasty'. Gaps have to be filled with anecdote yet he has done a spectacular job in terms of research and interviews so that we get one of the best pictures I have ever seen of ordinary people in an extraordinary situation. If these people had not been satellites around a remarkable business genius, they would be just another of England's council estate familes ... and such people rarely get a biography. This book is highly recommended. The problem is just that Raymond (rather than his times) does struggle to be interesting in himself. I hope his publishers now commission Willetts to look at a similar type of figure but one with more, shall we say, oomph to him as a personality. But Willetts makes up for all this by telling a clear story of a place (Soho), its characters and its development. If you love London, you will love this book.